Dulce Et Decorum Est
by The Sugarfaerie
Summary: A glimpse of Mal and Zoe during the war: what happened to them, how they changed and what makes them so close. Rated for some gory war imagery.


This is pre-series, set during the war. More-than-implied Mal/Zoe, but still more on the friendship side.

Disclaimer: Joss owns all, I merely borrow.

Dulce Et Decorum Est My friend, you would not tell with such high zest 

_To children ardent for some desperate glory_

_The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est_

_Pro patria mori._

_-Wilfred Owen, 'Dulce Et Decorum Est'_

The air stank of blood.

The smell surrounded Zoe Alleyne until she thought she would never be rid of the heat of it, the metallic tang so familiar as her own sweat-stained skin. Gripping her weapon to her chest, she checked how many rounds she had left almost automatically, grubby fingers sliding over the casings, nails ripped and bitten to the quick. Centuries of warfare and one thing never changed: it was always dirty.

Sergeant Malcolm Reynolds dropped to the ground beside her, announcing his presence with a groan as he laid his gun beside him. "Zoe," he croaked, as if litres of whiskey had worn his voice away. "Everything sittin' pretty back here?"

Zoe glanced at his face, grimy with years worth of dirt, and spoke for the first time in days. "Pretty as we can make it, sir. Trench is secure, at least."

"Huh." Mal pulled a battered canteen from his jacket and took a tight-lipped swig. "How's Private Morris holdin' up?"

"Dead."

"Oh…" Mal trailed off, still holding the canteen between his hands. "I thought that wound would finish him off. First skirmish, too. You ever get the feelin' they're not sendin' us quality troops no more?"

"Every day, sir." _Every day a soldier gets a bullet in the brainpan for sticking his head out the trench. Every day we try to advance and half the platoon gets mowed down in seconds._

"Funny, that." The silence between the two of them provided everything he couldn't quite communicate in words. Zoe understood them anyway. Mal groaned again as he shifted into a more comfortable position, dried blood on his cheek cracking with the movement. "So, Zoe," he went on as if continuing an interrupted conversation. "What're you plannin' on doing after the war?"

Zoe shrugged as much as her stiff muscles would allow. "Can't say, sir. Got a few cousins scattered about the platoons, but apart from that, family's all long dead. Got nothing outside the army, now."

Mal fixed her with a characteristically lopsided grin, the one that made green-as-grass soldiers follow him to whatever hell the high command sent them. "I'm gonna go home to the ranch, myself. It's smallish, but I've got cash to build it up, now. Hey, since you've got no folks, how 'bout you come with me? It's okay work, even for a skylark like you."

Zoe paused as a shell whined into a nearby trench, making the ground vibrate with the impact. How many poor bastards got caught in that? Next to her, Mal winced almost invisibly. Someone screamed.

"Skylark." The word slipped from her lips like it was something ancient, forbidden. Amazing how one word could have so much power, as much power as 'forever' or 'always' or 'God'. "I'm a skylark." She looked to the heavens, but they were too clouded in smoke to see the stars. "I'll never make a rock my home," Zoe finished, and she confirmed it as much for herself as for him.

Mal nodded and muttered something, understanding. "Best check on the troops," he forced between gritted teeth. "Morale, y'know."

Getting to her feet proved to be an even larger effort than Zoe thought it would be. Picking up her gun, she waded ankle-deep in mud from yesterday's rainfall, checking that no privates were courting death fiddling with their grenades. Her boots lifted from the muck with a wet, most indecent sucking sound, making Private Tracey snicker into his beans. A raised eyebrow shut him up.

"Know when we're gettin' water, Corporal?" another soldier shouted, abandoning his card game with Tracey. "Some _hun dan _went an' put a bullet in my canteen."

Zoe tried to make out the private's face, but he was too caked in mud. "Can't say, soldier," she replied, ignoring the answering moan of protest.

Moving further down the trench, Zoe spotted a painfully young soldier scribbling designs on her trousers with a black marker. Zoe wondered, irrelevantly, how a soldier could have kept the marker for so long before hunkering down beside her. "Beautifying your uniform, Private Gregory?"

The private's head snapped up at Zoe's inquiry, and she hid the marker in her jacket with something close to panic. "Sorry, Corporal," she stammered, wiping stringy blonde hair out of her face. Lice crawled across her forehead. "I… I ran outta paper… Drawin' helps… keeps me head."

Zoe pressed her lips together. The drawings couldn't really be seen amongst the dirt, anyway. "Get yourself some paper next time," she reprimanded.

Private Gregory nodded miserably. "Yes, ma'am," she whispered. Her fingers kept tracing along the designs on her trousers, and Zoe couldn't help glancing at them. Flowers and waves and stars. Everything they didn't have.

"What's your first name, Private?" Zoe asked gently, softening. This girl was no soldier. Probably joined up because all the other village kids were doing it and there were no other jobs for them around.

Private Gregory sniffed. "Alice."

Zoe straightened up, military poised. "Nice drawings, Alice."

She was discussing ammo with a couple more experienced fighters when she heard it; that piercing, deadly whine, and then a blow knocked the wind out of her as she smashed into the ground.

&#&#&#&#

"Corporal? Zoe!"

Her face was wet and ice cold. It pressed into something. Mud. Trench. Alive. Head, attached to a neck. Zoe's features began to reassert themselves. Shoulders, torso, arms. Legs. Where were her legs? A spike of panic was calmed when searing pain shot through her knees. As long as she could feel the hurt, they were still attached.

Her mind mapped her surroundings and she became aware of a voice, roaring, on the verge of despair. "Zoe?"

Someone rolled her over, and she could breathe again.

"No. Don't you leave me. Gorramit, don't you leave me, now!"

Sergeant Reynolds. Sir. Mal. A hand rested on her shoulder, just above her heart, while another ghosted across her cheek. "Don't you leave me…" His voice cracked. Did that sound like a sob?

Zoe coughed, pulling in lung-fulls of air. "Wasn't… planning to, sir," she managed, before passing out.

&#&#&#&#

When she next came to she was still in that god-awful trench, strapped to a stretcher waiting for a medic to lift her out. The platoon was in chaos. Private Tracey was keening in agony, holding a bleeding shoulder. Shrapnel wound, Zoe realised. She had seen enough of them to tell in an instant. Next to him a gunner twitched and bucked while the flesh melted off his face, bursting and shrivelling with a sickening scent of barbecue. Mal came by and, expression grim; put his gun to the soldier's head and put him out of his misery. Zoe scanned for Alice the artist and found only a limb and a crater where she had been sitting. So that was whose blood Zoe was coated in. At least it wasn't her own.

Mal strode into the infirmary tent the moment he got leave. Three days rest and recuperation and he would be back on the front line. He stood next to Zoe's cot, his grin even more lopsided than usual. "Hey there, Zoe," he breathed. He reached towards her, and for a moment Zoe thought he was going to take her hand, but he pulled back.

"Sir," she answered, terse as ever. He had called her by her first name since the moment she'd been assigned to him, saying he couldn't really trust someone he knew only by their last name. In a turnabout, he had tried to convince her to call him Mal when not on active duty, but she'd flatly refused. Let him break the rules.

His face hardened and he shifted back into a soldier's mindset. "How you holdin' up?"

Zoe's eyelids fluttered, dazed from the painkillers they injected into her. ""Spect I'll be just fine, sir. Got some broken bones, but they fused 'em quick. Should be back on duty within a week, they said."

Mal shifted. For the first time, the silence between them was awkward, not comforting. Ai ya, this was so much easier out there in the field.

"Well," Mal finally broke in, scratching his cheek while he kept his eyes fixed on the dirt floor. "Don't, uh… Make sure you go easy, Zoe. Don't want you to, y'know, get hurt. I mean…" He shuffled, seeming so out of sorts that Zoe wondered if he was going to ask to court her, and what the hell she would say in reply. A soldier cried out in a cot nearby, and the distraction seemed to jolt Mal out of whatever foolishness he was about to commit. "Hope you're still willin' to follow me, soldier, after the near-being-killed and all."

Zoe felt him move away, become her superior officer once more, and found she didn't regret it. No complications needed, not when bullets were flying.

"Always, sir."

&#&#&#&#

"Y'know, sometimes I think I'm gonna die in Serenity Valley."

Zoe fixed her sergeant with a classic stop-bullshitting-and-pull-yourself-together glare. "Way to encourage the troops, sir."

Mal glanced around the foxhole and lowered his voice even further. "Relyin' on you not spread it around," he muttered. "Not that it means a damn thing. Gorram high-ups leaving us to rot in this place…"

Zoe lowered her eyes, trying not to focus on her leg wound that was fast becoming infected. "Treaty'll be settled soon, sir." It wouldn't make a difference, she reflected silently. One hell was much like another, and she knew what to expect in the POW camps. Not that the Independents would have done any different had they got their hands on female Alliance soldiers. She vowed to take her attackers down with her, killing as many as she could. Zoe didn't need weapons to end a man.

Mal leant against her shoulder, staring up at the sky. Thinking of Shadow, if there was anything of Shadow left. Reavers tended to excel at the 'total destruction' thing. His warmth beside Zoe had no desire in it. After those fumbling moments early in the war he realised that they didn't need romance to cement what they had between them. She was his friend, his comrade, the only family left in the verse, and he held onto her because without Zoe, he was nothing.

"I thought…" he began, swallowing. They were the hardest words he'd ever had to say. "I thought by goin' to war I was doing the right thing for my mother an' the folks back on Shadow. All this talk of nobility and protectin' and duty'd turn a man's head. Thought I could help, that things'd get better if I volunteered. Now here I am, on some world light-years away from my own, while everythin' back home gets destroyed." He hunched over as if in agony, and the noise that burst from him was nothing less than animal. "I should've been there!" he sobbed, not caring that every conscious soldier had turned towards him. "It should've been me, I should've defended 'em…"

Zoe felt her heart ache at the sight of him. Here was her sergeant and her friend, the only reason she was alive and halfway sane in the first place, and he was being destroyed from the inside out, on his knees in a bloody battlefield that he had lost. Her arms were around him before she even knew what she was doing, offering him comfort, such as it was.

"Mal…"

He turned his face to her, feral with grief. "You skylarks had it right, Zoe," he gasped while he clutched at her, almost crushing her body against him. "A rock'll… never be a home. Might as well…" He laid his against her chest while she rocked him like a child with night terrors; desperate to hear her beating heart and prove she hadn't deserted him. "…Take to the sky. Can't take… They can't take the sky."

&#&#&#&#&#

There were occasions, just after the war mostly, when Zoe thought she would marry Mal if he asked. There had never been any passion between them, at least, no passion that she cared to remember. Drink and post-POW camp depression could do odd things to a person. If he declared love for her now it would simply be another path, one they both hadn't yet cared to tread. But his touches never extended past a comradely clap on the shoulder before ceasing altogether. If Zoe didn't know better, she would think he was afraid.

When he held her eyes she knew, knew that he had laid down arms and given up winning her affections long before she chose the cocky pilot for a mate. Mal didn't understand, at first, why she fell in love with Wash, love that was so intense it threatened to consume them both. She couldn't explain it herself, and so sat in silence while Mal ranted and raved when he found out Wash had taken her into his bed and then offered to share more besides.

She crossed her arms while she waited for Mal to finish his tirade, more set against him than she had ever been. "Doesn't change anything about us, sir," she broke in firmly, voice deceptively calm. Mals' eyes widened and he plunked into a chair with a heavy thump, knowing not to interrupt her when she used that tone. Zoe paused anyway, finding it oddly amusing to watch him squirm. "I'm still your first mate. You're still my captain. Ain't gonna change any time soon. So don't order me to pass this up again. That'll be an order I can't follow."

He gazed at her, speechless, then nodded. Strategic retreat.

Zoe fell asleep in Wash's arms that night, once he'd finished his absurdly long shift. He woke her from her nightmares and said he would protect her from them, that he didn't expect her to be strong and soldier through them on her own.

She knew she'd made the right choice.


End file.
